Panetta makes first comments on Petraeus' affair

Security Clearance

The network pool traveling to Australia with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta reports that Panetta commented for the first time about the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus. The comments were given during a mid-flight press conference:

SECRETARY OF DEFENSE LEON PANETTA:  “First, obviously, it was a very sad situation to have a distinguished career like that end in this manner. And my heart obviously goes out to him and his family, but I think he took the right step and I think its important when you’re director of the CIA with all the challenges that face you in that position, that personal integrity comes first and foremost.”

“With regards to the future, you know, having served there the first 2 years of this administration, I think its really important to continue to have the CIA stay on track doing the job that is absolutely essential to our national security. They have very important mission focused on intelligence and intelligence operations and I think it’s very important to get someone strong and capable and dedicated to be able to continue that effort. This is a critical time to make sure that with all the threats that we’re dealing with in the world, that we maintain a strong intelligence operation.”

REPORTER QUESTION:  Any indications the Petraeus affair started while he was on active duty? Could he be prosecuted? Would that be your call? (NOTE:  CNN has learned that the affair started after Petraeus was already serving as CIA director)

PANETTA:  “You know, I don’t know the answer to that. I guess, I’m reading the papers like you are to determine just what the committees finds out, what the ultimate investigation determines on that issue. We obviously are going to watch this closely to determine just exactly when that took place. But I think right now my view is lets see what the investigation turns up and what the congress, these committees are able to determine just exactly what took place.”

REPORTER QUESTION:  As a former member of congress – do you think Capitol Hill should have been briefed sooner?

PANETTA:  “That’s another issue I think we ought to look at, because as a former director of the CIA and having working very closely with the intelligence committees, you know I believe there is a responsibility to make sure that the intelligence committees are informed of issues that could affect, you know the security of those intelligence operations.”

Assessing security implications of Petraeus' infidelity

Security Clearance 

With reporting from Suzanne Kelly and Pam Benson/ By CNN's Adam Levine

While affairs may be commonplace in Washington, when they involve the director of the CIA, things can take on a different tone.

Paula Broadwell and David Petraeus/
dailymail.co.uk

A U.S. official has said there was no breach of national security as a result of David Petraeus' affair, but that hasn't stopped discussion that Paula Broadwell could have gained access to classified information as a result of what she has routinely described as "unprecedented access" to Petraeus.

That discussion seemed to gain momentum Monday thanks to comments Broadwell made in a speech last month at the University of Denver.

"I don't know if a lot of you have heard this, but the CIA annex had actually taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner and they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to get these prisoners back," Broadwell said.

A senior intelligence official told CNN on Monday, "These detention claims are categorically not true. Nobody was ever held at the annex before, during, or after the attacks."

Broadwell's source for that previously unpublished bit of information remains unclear, and there's no evidence so far that it came from Petraeus. Administration officials have said the Benghazi assault was a terrorist attack.

The New York Times also reported Sunday that investigators found classified documents on Broadwell's laptop computer. The newspaper cited investigators as saying Petraeus denied he had given them to her.

Retired Gen. James "Spider" Marks, for whom Broadwell once worked and who knows Petraeus, said he doubts security protocols were breached despite what seems an unlikely indiscretion on the part of Petraeus.

"There's almost zero percent chance that national security was compromised or at risk," he said Monday.

A senior U.S. intelligence official said an extramarital affair by a CIA officer is not automatically considered a security violation.

"It depends on the circumstances," the official said.

The official also said Broadwell did not have a security clearance from the CIA.

Another official said Broadwell, who is a reserve Army officer, did have some kind of security clearance and that there are no issues with Broadwell having unauthorized access to classified information.

Petraeus' resignation also presents challenges to the congressional inquiry into the Benghazi attack.

CNN has confirmed that Petraeus recently traveled to Libya to meet the CIA station chief to discuss the attack. He was scheduled to testify before a congressional committee this week on the assault and the U.S. government response to it.

That will now not happen, but it is possible that he could be summoned by Congress to testify later.

Some Republicans have criticized the administration's response to the Benghazi attack and have speculated that Petraeus' departure was linked to the congressional inquiry.

Rep. Peter King, R-New York, said elements of the story "don't add up." He called Petraeus "an absolutely essential witness, maybe more than anybody else."

However, a senior U.S. official said Petraeus' departure wasn't connected to the Benghazi hearing.

"Director Petraeus' frank and forthright letter of resignation stands on its own," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. "Any suggestion that his departure has anything to do with criticism about Benghazi is completely baseless."

Conspiracy or coincidence? Petraeus scandal scrutinized

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Chair of the Senate Intelligence: "We need to talk to Gen. Petraeus"

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CIA spymaster, hello this is my email!

hard to believe that someone has access to CIA Director's personal e-mail account
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CIA Director David Petraeus speaks during a high-level meeting in the White House Situation Room. (Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images)

Why David Petraeus's Gmail account is a national security issue
Washington Post/ Max Fisher 

The beginning of the end came for CIA Director David Petraeus when Paula Broadwell, a younger married woman with whom he was having an affair, “or someone close to her had sought access to his email,” according to the Wall Street Journal’s description of an FBI probe. Associates of Petraeus had received “anonymous harassing emails” that were then traced to Broadwell, ABC’s Martha Raddatz reported, suggesting she may have found their names or addresses in his e-mail.

The e-mail account was apparently Petraeus’s personal Gmail, not his official CIA e-mail, according to the Wall Street Journal. That’s a big deal: Some of the most powerful foreign spy agencies in the world would love to have an opening, however small, into the personal e-mail account of the man who runs the United States’ spy service. The information could have proved of enormous value to foreign hackers, who already maintain a near-constant effort to access sensitive U.S. data.

If Petraeus allowed his Gmail security to be compromised even slightly, by widening access, sharing passwords or logging in from multiple addresses, it would have brought foreign spy agencies that much closer to a treasure trove of information. As the Wall Street Journal hints, investigators were concerned about Petraeus’s Gmail access precisely because of the history of foreign attempts to access just such accounts:

Security officials are sensitive to misuse of personal email accounts—not only official accounts—because there have been multiple instances of foreign hackers targeting personal emails.

A personal e-mail account like Petraeus’s almost certainly would not have contained any high-level intelligence; he probably didn’t keep a list of secret drone-base coordinates on his Google docs account. But access to the account could have provided telling information on, for example, Petraeus’s travel schedule, his foreign contacts, even personal information about himself or other senior U.S. officials.

Private e-mail services like Google’s, though considered significantly more secure than most, still have susceptibilities to foreign intrusion. And it happens. Technology writers have sometimes discussed what one writer called the “password fallacy,” the false sense of safety created by access systems such as Google’s that balance security against ease of use. Even with Google’s extra security features, the company must also avoid making security so onerous as to drive away customers, making it an easier target for foreign hackers even before Petraeus possibly started sharing access and thus diluting the account’s integrity. And, as a Wired magazine investigation demonstrated in August, personal e-mail accounts often allow hackers access to other personal accounts, worsening both the infiltration and the damage.

All of this might sound a little overly apprehensive – really, U.S. national security is compromised because the CIA director’s personal Gmail account might have been a little easier to hack? – until you start looking at the scale and sophistication of foreign attempts to infiltrate U.S. data sources. Chinese hacking efforts, perhaps the best-known but nowhere near the only threat to U.S. networks and computers, suggest the enormous scope and ferocious drive of foreign government hackers.

Some Americans who have access to sensitive information and who travel to China describe going to tremendous lengths to minimize government efforts to seize their data. Some copy and paste their passwords from USB thumb drives rather than type them out, for fear of key-logging software. They carry “loaner” laptops and cellphones and pull out cellphone batteries during sensitive meetings, worried that the microphone could be switched on remotely. The New York Times called such extreme measures, which also apply in other countries, “standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies.”

Even still, the publicly reported incidents of successful Chinese hacking – such as a March intrusion that stole a $1 billion, 10-year research project overnight – suggest that the efforts might be near-continuous and the successes rampant. A 2010 Chinese infiltration of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ended up funneling weeks of corporate data; even after the chamber thought it had reestablished security, it discovered that an office printer and a corporate apartment thermostat were still sending data – who knows what kind? – back to China. You have to wonder what a similar infiltration into the private e-mail account of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency might have turned up.

Of course, the CIA director is not the Chamber of Commerce, which may explain why the FBI’s counter-intelligence monitoring is so sensitive that just Broadwell’s access to his Gmail account triggered an investigation. But the fact that the FBI looked so hard and so carefully – and that Petraeus lost his directorship of the CIA over an intrusion that many of us might consider minor or even routine – underscores the potential risk to U.S. intelligence entailed in Petraeus’s, or Broadwell’s, alleged misuse of his personal account.

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FBI probe of Petraeus triggered by e-mail threats from biographer, officials say

Paula Broadwell with Gen. David Petraeus [CSM Marvin L. Hill]

The collapse of the career of CIA Director David Petraeus was triggered when a woman with whom he was having an affair sent threatening e-mails to another woman close to him, according to three senior law enforcement officials with knowledge of the episode.

The recipient of the e-mails was so frightened that she went to the FBI for protection and help tracking down the sender, according to the officials. The FBI investigation traced the threats to Paula Broadwell, a former military officer and Petraeus biographer, and uncovered explicit e-mails between Broadwell and Petraeus, the officials said. Read more on  Washington Post >>

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CIA Director David Petraeus resigns, cites extramarital affair

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Read >>

Anomalies of the Air Defense on 9/11-Paul Schreyer

corbettreport

The systematic failure of every level of the US air defense on the morning of September 11th provides one of the clearest "smoking guns" in the full complicity of key elements of the US government and defense department in those attacks. In his new peer-reviewed article published at the Journal of 9/11 Studies, author and researcher Paul Schreyer outlines many of these key anomalies and the way they have been carefully covered up by the so-called 9/11 investigations. Find out more in this week's GRTV Feature Interview.

U.S. officials: Iran is behind recent cyberattacks

Security Clearance

Read >>

Panetta: Cyber intruders have already infiltrated US systems

By Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube, NBC News

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta issued a call to arms against cyber attacks on U.S. targets and said the Pentagon must be prepared to launch preemptive attacks in cyberspace against potential attackers. He warned that a cyber attack by a nation state or terrorists on the U.S. could be America's "cyber Pearl Harbor" and "be just as destructive as the terrorist attack of 9/11."

In a speech before business executives in New York, Panetta revealed that cyber intruders have already gained access to some of America's critical control systems that run chemical, electric and water systems with the intent to "cause panic, destruction and loss of life."

With a current annual budget of $3 billion for cybersecurity, Panetta urged that more needs to be done to create an army of "skilled cyber warriors" to confront the immediate and growing threat. The Defense Department is already hammering out new "rules of engagement" for a potential cyber war.  More >>

US Warns Two Chinese Companies Pose Security Risk

Eurasia Review

By Cindy Saine

U.S. companies considering doing business with Chinese telecommunications companies Huawei and ZTE are being warned to find another vendor. A U.S. House of Representatives report said the companies pose a long-term corporate and national security threat.

At a news conference on Capitol Hill, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, a Republican from Michigan, said the committee began investigating concerns about the telecommunications companies Huawei and ZTE a year ago, interviewing former Huawei employees, industry experts and intelligence officials.

China – US Relations

Rogers said the panel was disappointed by the incomplete, contradictory and evasive answers provided by Huawei and ZTE during the investigation.

“The investigation concluded that the risks associated with these companies providing equipment and services to U.S. critical infrastructure undermines the core U.S. national security interests,” Rogers said.

An Intelligence Committee report recommends U.S. government systems, especially sensitive systems, exclude Huawei and ZTE equipment and component parts. The report pointed out critical infrastructure, everything from electric-power grids to banking and finance systems to water systems, is extremely inter-connected, and said the risk is high that a failure or disruption in one system could have a devastating ripple effect.

Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, a Democrat from Maryland, warned of a heightened risk of cyber-espionage or cyber-attack from the two firms that he said clearly have ties with the Chinese government.

“We already know the Chinese are aggressively hacking into our nation’s networks, threatening our critical infrastructure, and stealing millions of dollars worth of trade secrets and other sensitive information from American companies,” he said.

Ruppersberger said $300 billion worth of U.S. trade secrets are stolen every year, and that most of the cases prosecuted involve China.

Huawei Vice President for External Affairs William Plummer attended the news conference and spoke to reporters afterwards. Plummer strongly rejected the conclusions of the investigation, and said it was motivated by political suspicions of China during an election year in the United States.

“There are politics and then there are facts,” said Plummer. “The facts are that this company is globally-trusted, and that our product is world-proven in terms of its security and integrity.”

Plummer said Huawei has too much to lose to collaborate with Chinese cyber-espionage. He said it is an independently-owned company that has been operating in the United States for years.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei also rejected the report, saying Chinese companies do not pose a national security threat to the United States. He said he hopes the U.S. Congress will, in his words, “set aside prejudices and respect the facts.”

U.S. national security policy officials say Huawei works closely with the Chinese military on research and development projects. Huawei is looking to expand in the U.S. telecommunications market, and its cellphones and 4G networks are popular worldwide.

Canada: "Enemies of the State"

Online spying threatens Canada's national security

OpenMedia.ca/ Lindsey Pinto

huffingtonpost.ca

An access-to-information request from The Globe and Mail has revealed that Canada’s Communications Security Establishment has concerns about our nation’s network security. Specifically, the documents show that Huawei Technologies—a Chinese company that has become the world’s leading maker of telecom equipment—has been the subject of national security concerns.

With all these security worries in the air, it seems strange that Ottawa should continue to consider a bill that could leave Canadians’ personal data less secure. Online spying bill C-30—a contentious piece of legislation that has provoked the ire of Canada’s privacy commissioners, legal experts, and wider public—could, if passed, lead to the creation of giant, unsecure registries of every Internet user’s personal data.

Introduced in the House of Commons earlier this year, Bill C-30 would require telecom providers in Canada to monitor user data, and be prepared to hand over personal information to authorities without a warrant or judicial oversight.

This on its own creates security risks: for C-30 to work, ISPs must implement and maintain both the technology and the personnel required to give authorities real-time, simultaneous access to transmissions in the form specified by law enforcement. This could also mean that telecom companies would be responsible for breaking data encryptions to facilitate use of the gathered information. This would be both expensive (note: the costs will be passed down to Canadians) and would create a security risk, as our personal data would pass through more and more people and systems vulnerable to cyber-attacks and other breaches.

With the advent of increased foreign control over Canada’s networks (i.e. one of the briefing notes uncovered by The Globe urges caution and asserts that Canada “can’t feasibly block foreign technology”) it seems reckless to consider a bill that would weaken Canadians’ control over private data. Huawei is already doing business with Canadian wireless providers, including big telecom companies Bell and Telus.

Would you feel safer under the online spying bill?

10 aspectos por que Chavez es una amenaza a la seguridad de EEUU

Fausta's Blog/

Venezuela and Chavez: President Obama Should Read His Intelligence Brief

• Iran. Venezuela’s military and security relations with Iran show no sign of diminishing; drones, military exchanges, preparation for asymmetric warfare are a few milestones of the anti-American Axis of Unity. In May 2011, the U.S. sanctioned Venezuela’s national oil company PDVSA. Many believe that this was just the tip of the iceberg.
• Syria. Chavez backs Syria’s murderous Bashar al-Assad to the hilt.
• Cuba. Chavez’s aid to Cuba’s Castro regime (nominally in exchange for doctors and intelligence personnel) exceeds $5 billion annually—more than double the U.S. assistance budget for all of Latin America—and enables the communist regime to survive and to repress the Cuban people.
• A terrorist haven. Chavez has rolled out the welcome mat to a host of terrorist organizations, includingHezbollah and the Basque ETA.
• A mafia state. Moises Naim writes that “senior Venezuelan government officials double as the heads of important transnational criminal gangs.” The U.S. described Chavez’s defense minister, General Henry Rangel Silva, as a drug kingpin in 2008.
• Higher gas prices. In OPEC, Chavez is a price hawk; he is mismanaging PDVSA—reducing global supply—and expropriates billions from U.S. companies, raising costs to U.S. consumers.
• Narco-terrorism in Colombia. Chavez identifies with and supports the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, whose leader, Timochenko, is believed to operate from a safe haven in Venezuela. Since 1999, the U.S. has invested $7 billion in Colombian democracy and security; Chavez prefers a Colombia ruled by narco-terrorists.
• Militarizing Venezuela. From Russian arms purchases to arming militias, Chavez militarizes Venezuelan society, threatens civil war, and endangers regional security.
• Corruption. With aid packages, oil deals, and cash-filled suitcases, Chavez corrupts freely and widely.
• Destabilization. Chavez backs left-wing leaders and destabilizes weak democracies, as he did inHonduras in 2009 and in Paraguay in 2012.

And let’s not forget that Chavez gave Iran the Astinave port (in Venezuela’s geographic point nearest to the USA and the Panama Canal), and an F-16 so Iran could test its antiaircraft radar systems and become familiar with its capabilities, in preparation for a possible strike.

More >>

More from DHS Insider

Canadian Free Press/ By Doug Hagmann

Northeast Intelligence Network

It was not one contact, but a series of contacts over the last month from which the following information was developed from my source within the Department of Homeland Security. My initial article citing this specific source was published on May 8, 2012.

This article details my subsequent contacts with my source beginning after May 14, 2012. Actual dates, times and locations have been omitted at the request of my source.

More >>

Loose lips and the Obama national security ship

Read >>

Kissinger's Date with the TSA

TheAlexJonesChannel/ By Kurt Nimmo

The TSA is not looking for al-Qaeda miscreants who want to blow up airplanes because they hate us for our freedom, as we are repeatedly told.

Beyond turbans and dark skin, its ill-trained employees know nothing about Arabs or Muslims. It does not use that predicate to initiate searches. That would be racial and religious profiling, which is forbidden under the hallowed tenets of political correctness.

Like some kind of lame predatory animal, it prefers instead to harass and molest the elderly, the very young, those in wheelchairs or hobbling along on crutches. It especially prefers to pat-down and run through naked body porno scanners attractive women.

On Friday, the TSA revealed that it not only does not know anything about terrorism, it also does not know who our rulers and their prized minions are.

Notorious war criminal and globalist Henry Kissinger was searched at LaGuardia Airport in New York. A TSA agent told the elderly wheelchair-bound Kissinger he needed to undergo a sexual molestation pat-down.

"He stood with his suit jacket off, and he was wearing suspenders," freelance reporter Matthew Cole told the Washington Post. "They gave him the full pat-down. None of the agents seemed to know who he was."

Considering past trickery by the government, it is also entirely possible this is a scheme designed to get the plebs to back off their growing criticism of the agency and eventually love their servitude, as Aldous Huxley suggested they likely would. How better to indoctrinate the masses than have a big player like Kissinger willingly subject himself to a "full Monty" pat-down, thus sending the message that none of us are free to come and go without government agents molesting us?

Thanks ‘Liberals’ For All You’ve Done to Protect Us From Terrorists Like This One

FrontPage Magazine/ By Daniel Ashton

Also there are thousand of cases like this one:

Security Specialist Exposes TSA Body Scanners as "Giant Fraud"

Uploaded by TheAlexJonesChannel 

On the Friday, April 6 edition of the Alex Jones Show, Alex talks with cryptographer, computer security specialist, and author Bruce Schneier. Mr. Schneier is a vocal critic of "security measures" used by the Transportation Security Administration. He was invited to testify before Congress about TSA abuses but was "formally uninvited" after the TSA complained. He is the author of numerous books, including Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive, Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, and Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

The 3 A.M. Phone Call: Zbigniew Brzezinski Received Warning of Incoming Nuclear Attack

http://www.nsarchive.org/

Zbigniew Brzezinski with Deng Xiaoping

Washington, D.C., March 1, 2012 – During the 2008 campaign, Democratic presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama debated the question: who was best suited to be suddenly awakened at 3 a.m. in the White House to make a tough call in a crisis. The candidates probably meant news of trouble in the Middle East or a terrorist attack in the United States or in a major ally, not an 'end of the world' phone call about a major nuclear strike on the United States. In fact at least one such phone call occurred during the Cold War, but it did not go to the President. It went to a national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was awakened on 9 November 1979, to be told that the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the combined U.S.–Canada military command–was reporting a Soviet missile attack. Just before Brzezinski was about to call President Carter, the NORAD warning turned out to be a false alarm. It was one of those moments in Cold War history when top officials believed they were facing the ultimate threat. The apparent cause? The routine testing of an overworked computer system.

Recently declassified documents about this incident and other false warnings of Soviet missile attacks delivered to the Pentagon and military commands by computers at NORAD in 1979 and 1980 are published today for the first time by the National Security Archive. The erroneous warnings, variously produced by computer tests and worn out computer chips, led to a number of alert actions by U.S. bomber and missile forces and the emergency airborne command post. Alarmed by reports of the incident on 9 November 1979, the Soviet leadership lodged a complaint with Washington about the "extreme danger" of false warnings. While Pentagon officials were trying to prevent future incidents, Secretary of Defense Harold Brown assured President Jimmy Carter that false warnings were virtually inevitable, although he tried to reassure the President that "human safeguards" would prevent them from getting out of control.

Among the disclosures in today's posting:

• Reports that the mistaken use of a nuclear exercise tape on a NORAD computer had produced a U.S. false warning and alert actions prompted Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev to write secretly to President Carter that the erroneous alert was "fraught with a tremendous danger." Further, "I think you will agree with me that there should be no errors in such matters."
• Commenting on the November 1979 NORAD incident, senior State Department adviser Marshal Shulman wrote that "false alerts of this kind are not a rare occurrence" and that there is a "complacency about handling them that disturbs me."
• With U.S.-Soviet relations already difficult, the Brezhnev message sparked discussion inside the Carter administration on how best to reply. Hard-liners prevailed and the draft that was approved included language ("inaccurate and unacceptable") that Marshal Shulman saw as "snotty" and "gratuitously insulting."
• Months later, in May and June 1980, 3 more false alerts occurred. The dates of two of them, 3 and 6 June 1980, have been in the public record for years, but the existence of a third event, cited in a memorandum from Secretary of Defense Brown to President Carter on 7 June 1980, has hitherto been unknown, although the details are classified.
• False alerts by NORAD computers on 3 and 6 June 1980 triggered routine actions by SAC and the NMCC to ensure survivability of strategic forces and command and control systems. The National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP) at Andrews Air Force Base taxied in position for emergency launch, although it remained in place. Because missile attack warning systems showed nothing unusual, the alert actions were suspended.
• Supposedly causing the incidents in June 1980 was the failure of a 46¢ integrated circuit ("chip") in a NORAD computer, but Secretary of Defense Brown reported to a surprised President Carter that NORAD "has been unable to get the suspected circuit to fail again under tests."
• In reports to Carter, Secretary cautioned that "we must be prepared for the possibility that another, unrelated malfunction may someday generate another false alert." Nevertheless, Brown argued that "human safeguards"—people reading data produced by warning systems--ensured that there would be "no chance that any irretrievable actions would be taken."

Background

For decades, the possibility of a Soviet missile attack preoccupied U.S. presidents and their security advisers. Because nuclear hostilities were more likely to emerge during a political-military confrontation (such as Cuba 1962, the likelihood of a bolt from the blue was remote but Washington nevertheless planned for the worst case. Under any circumstances, U.S. presidents and top military commanders wanted warning systems that could provide them with the earliest possible notice of missile launches by the Soviet Union or other adversaries. By the early 1960s, the Pentagon had the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWs) that could provide about 15 minutes of warning time. By the mid-to-late1960s, forward-scatter systems (so-called "Over the Horizon Radar") could detect missile launches within five to seven minutes from while, while the 474N system could give three-to-seven minutes of warning of launches from submarines off the North American coast. [1]

By the end of the 1960s, the United States was getting ready to deploy the Defense Support Program satellites which use infrared technology to detect plumes produced by missile launches. DSP could be used to tell whether missile launches were only tests or whether they signified a real attack by detecting number of missile launches and trajectory. This provided25 to 30 minutes of warning along with information on the trajectory and ultimate targets of the missiles. As long as decision-makers were not confronting the danger of a SLBM launch, the DSP would give them some time to decide how to retaliate.

In 1972, the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) began to network warning systems into at "interlinked system" operated at its headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado.[2] A complex computer-based system always bore the risk of failure, break-downs, or errors. Even before networking emerged, false warnings emerged as early as 1960 when a BMEWs radar in Greenland caught "echoes from the moon," which generated a report of a missile attack which was quickly understood to be false (see document 1). During the Cuban Missile Crisis false warning episodes occurred, some of them involving NORAD, that were virtually unknown for many years.[3] If there were significant incidents during the years that followed, it remains to be learned. But once the networked systems were in place, the possibility that they would typically produce false warnings became evident. 

The Events of 1979-1980

"As he recounted it to me, Brzezinski was awakened at three in the morning by [military assistant William] Odom, who told him that some 250 Soviet missiles had been launched against the United States. Brzezinski knew that the President's decision time to order retaliation was from three to seven minutes …. Thus he told Odom he would stand by for a further call to confirm Soviet launch and the intended targets before calling the President. Brzezinski was convinced we had to hit back and told Odom to confirm that the Strategic Air Command was launching its planes. When Odom called back, he reported that … 2,200 missiles had been launched—it was an all-out attack. One minute before Brzezinski intended to call the President, Odom called a third time to say that other warning systems were not reporting Soviet launches. Sitting alone in the middle of the night, Brzezinski had not awakened his wife, reckoning that everyone would be dead in half an hour. It had been a false alarm. Someone had mistakenly put military exercise tapes into the computer system." -- Robert M. Gates. From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How they Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996),114.

The series of alarming incidents and telephone phone calls recounted by former NSC staffer (and later CIA director and future Secretary of Defense) Robert Gates took place in the middle of the night on 9 November 1979. Because of the potentially grave implications of the event, the episode quickly leaked to the media, with the Washington Post and The New York Times printing stories on what happened. According to press reports, based on Pentagon briefings, a NORAD staffer caused the mistake by mistakenly loading a training/exercise tape into a computer, which simulated an "attack into the live warning system." This was a distortion because it was not a matter of a "wrong tape," but software simulating a Soviet missile attack then testing NORAD's 427M computers "was inexplicably transferred into the regular warning display" at the Command's headquarters. Indeed, NORAD's Commander-in-chief later acknowledged that the "precise mode of failure … could not be replicated."[4]

The information on the display simultaneously appeared on screens at SAC headquarters and the National Military Command Center (NMCC), which quickly led to defensive actions: NORAD alerted interceptor forces and 10 fighters were immediately launched. Moreover, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post (NEACP), used so the president could control U.S. forces during a nuclear war, was launched from Andrews Air Force Base, although without the president or secretary of defense.

Some of this information did not reach the public for months, but at least one reporter received misleading information about how high the alert went. According to the New York Times' sources, the warning was "deemed insufficiently urgent to warrant notifying top Government or military officials." Apparently no one wanted to tell reporters (and further scare the public) that the phone call went to President's Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski.

The behind-the-scenes story became more complicated because the Soviet leadership was worried enough to lodge a complaint with Washington. The Cold War tensions had already been exacerbated during the previous year and this could not help (nor could an impending Kremlin decision to invade Afghanistan). On 14 November, party leader Leonid Brezhnev sent a message via Ambassador Anatoly Dobyrnin expressing his concern about the incident which was "fraught with a tremendous danger." What especially concerned Brezhnev were press reports that top U.S. leaders had not been informed at the time about the warning. The Defense Department and Brzezinski took hold of the reply to Brezhnev's message which senior State Department adviser Marshall Shulman saw as "gratuitously snotty" (for example, language about the "inaccurate and unacceptable" Soviet message). The Soviets were indeed miffed because they later replied that the U.S. message was not "satisfactory" because it had taken a polemical approach to Moscow's "profound and natural concern."

About seven months later, U.S. warning systems generated three more false alerts. One occurred on 28 May 1980; it was a minor harbinger of false alerts on 3 and 6 June 1980. According to the Pentagon, what caused the malfunctions in June 1980 was a failed 46¢ micro-electronic integrated circuit ("chip") and "faulty message design." A computer at NORAD made what amounted to "typographical errors" in the routine messages it sent to SAC and the National Military Command Center (NMCC) about missile launches. While the message usually said "OOO" ICBMs or SLBMs had been launched, some of the zeroes were erroneously filled in with a 2, e.g. 002 or 200, so the message indicated that 2, then 200 SLBMs were on their way. Once the message arrived at SAC, the command took survivability measures by ordering bomber pilots and crews to their stations at alert bombers and tankers and to start the engines.

No NORAD interceptors were launched so something had been learned from the November episode, but SAC took same precautionary measures. The Pacific Command's airborne command post ("Blue Eagle") was launched for reasons that remain mysterious.[5] NEACP taxied in position at Andrews Air Force Base, but it was not launched as in November. That missile warning sensors (DSP, BMEWs, etc) showed nothing amiss made it possible for military commanders to call off further action. According to a Senate report, NORAD ran its computers the next 3 days in order to isolate the cause of the error; the "mistake was reproduced" in the mid-afternoon of 6 June with the similar results and SAC took defensive measures.[6]

When Harold Brown explained to President Carter what had happened and what was being done to fix the system, he cautioned that "we must be prepared for the possibility that another, unrelated malfunction may someday generate another false alert." This meant that "we must continue to place our confidence in the human element of our missile attack warning system." Brown, however, did not address a problem raised by journalists who asked Pentagon officials, if another false alert occurred, whether a "chain reaction" could be triggered when "duty officers in the Soviet Union read data on the American alert coming into their warning systems." A nameless U.S. defense official would give no assurances that a "chain reaction" would not occur, noting that "I hope they have as secure a system as we do, that they have the safeguards we do."

How good the safeguards actually were remains an open question. While Secretary of Defense Brown acknowledged the "possibility" of future false alerts, he insisted on the importance of human safeguards in preventing catastrophes. Stanford University professor Scott Sagan's argument about "organizational failure" is critical of that optimism on several counts. For example, under some circumstances false alerts could have had more perilous outcomes, e.g. if Soviet missile tests had occurred at the same time or if there were serious political tensions with Moscow, defense officials might have been jumpier and launched bomber aircraft or worse. Further, false warnings were symptomatic of "more serious problems with the way portions of the command system had been designed." Yet, defense officials have been reluctant to acknowledge organizational failings, instead blaming mistakes on 46¢ chips or individuals inserting the wrong tape. Treating the events of 1979 and 1980 as "normal accidents" in complex systems, Sagan observes that defense officials are reluctant to learn from mistakes and have persuaded themselves that the system is "foolproof."[7]

Bruce Blair also sees systemic problems. Once a "launch-under--attack" strategic nuclear option became embedded in war planning policy during the late 1970s, he sees the weakening of the safeguards that had been in place, e.g., confirmation that a Soviet nuclear attack was in progress or had already occurred. One of the arguments for taking Minuteman ICBMs off their current high alert status (making virtually instantaneous launch possible) has been that a false warning, combined with an advanced state of readiness, raises the risk of accidental nuclear war. The risk of false alerts/accidental war is one of the considerations that is prompting other anti-nuclear activists, including Daniel Ellsberg, to protest at Vandenberg Air Force Base against the Minuteman ICBM program and the continued testing of Minutemen.[8]

The Soviet nuclear command and control system that developed during the 1980s provides an interesting contrast with the U.S.'s. While the United States emphasized "human safeguards" as a firewall, the "Perimeter" nuclear warning-nuclear strike system may have minimized them. In large part, it was a response to Soviet concern that a U.S. decapitating strike, aimed at the political leadership and central control systems, could cripple retaliatory capabilities. Reminiscent of the "doomsday machine" in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Perimeter could launch a semi-automatic nuclear strike under specified conditions, for example, no contact with political or military leaders, atomic bombs detonating, etc. If such conditions were fulfilled, a few military personnel deep in an underground bunker could launch emergency command and control rockets which in turn would transmit launch orders to ICBMs in their silos. According to David Hoffman's Pulitzer-prize winning The Dead Hand, when Bruce Blair learned about Perimeter, he was "uneasy that it put launch orders in the hands of a few, with so much automation." While the system may have been operational as late as the early 1990s, only declassification decisions by Russian authorities can shed light on Perimeter's evolution.[9]

According to Bruce Blair, writing in the early 1990s, warning system failures continued after 1980, although they did not trigger alert measures.[10] The U.S. nuclear incidents that have received the most attention have not been false warnings, but events such as the Air Force's accidental movement of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles from Minot AFB to Barksdale AFB in 2007 and the mistaken transfer of Minuteman nose-cone assemblies to Taiwan in 2006. In any event, more needs to be learned about the problem of false warnings during and after the Cold War and pending declassification requests and appeals may shed further light on this issue. 
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